De Niro: A Life (82 page)

M
AYBE IT WAS
because he was a secretive fellow at heart, but even though he might be the last actor in the world you could imagine starring in a spy story, De Niro had a fascination with the genre. Among the projects that seemed always to be simmering on a back burner at Tribeca Productions was an idea he had to make a film about the Cold War. When he visited Russia in 1997 to receive an award from the Moscow Film Festival, he arranged to stop by a former KGB social club and chat with some former agents in the sauna, just to size them up (one fellow half-jokingly challenged him to a boxing match, being as he was the star of
Raging Bull
and all, ha ha ha).

In 1997, when he was in France working for John Frankenheimer on Ronin—playing a spy for the first time in his career—he learned that there was already a well-regarded script about the CIA during the Cold War kicking around and that Frankenheimer was on board to direct it. Was he interested in maybe appearing in it? Yes; yes, he was.

The script, eventually known as
The Good Shepherd
, had been written by Eric Roth (
Forrest Gump
) for Francis Coppola, who found himself unable to pursue it. Director Wayne Wang briefly circled it with the intention of having Tom Cruise play the lead character, a man who joins the CIA after attending Yale and is involved in much of the clandestine spy-vs.-spy activity between World War II and the Bay of Pigs. That iteration of the film vanished, too, as did one with Philip Kaufman attached to direct. Then it fell to Frankenheimer.

Not long after, though, De Niro was in talks not to star in the film but to direct it. He even made a gentleman’s agreement with Eric Roth, stating that if he got
Good Shepherd
made, then Roth would write a sequel, bringing the story forward from the 1960s to the present day. By
the fall of 1999, talk of De Niro directing the film had gotten serious enough that the conversation turned to whom he would cast in the lead, as De Niro himself was clearly too old to play a Yale undergrad. In February 2000, De Niro held a table reading of Roth’s script in New York, with Jude Law taking the lead and Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Christopher Plummer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Martin Scorsese, and De Niro himself reading along. Law never quite said yes, and in 2002 talk bubbled up that had Leonardo DiCaprio in the role. On the strength of that bit of casting, several financiers appeared ready to go through with funding the film’s estimated $110 million budget.

DiCaprio, though, was proving trigger shy, with a strong commitment to Martin Scorsese to make
The Aviator
and a plan to follow up immediately with Scorsese’s
The Departed.
De Niro grew frustrated with the young actor: “
I said one night, ‘You have to let me know now. Are you in or are you out?’ ” The combination of DiCaprio’s time constraints and salary demands ultimately swamped the tenuous deal to make
The Good Shepherd
, and in November 2004 the film seemed to have been scuttled, with producer Graham King declaring, “
I’d love to make this movie. It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. But you can’t make this movie for any less than we have budgeted for. I certainly wouldn’t disrespect Bob by getting him to cut the budget.”

But a lifeline came in the form of DiCaprio’s
Departed
co-star, Matt Damon, who (1) also loved the script, (2) would finish his work with Scorsese sooner than DiCaprio, and (3) was demanding less money. Suddenly, just a few weeks after DiCaprio’s departure and the film’s apparent demise,
The Good Shepherd
was back in business, at a budget of just under $90 million with a start date of March 2005. “
Matt was crucial,” De Niro later revealed. “He said, ‘I love this script, I’d do it for nothing.’ And he did. Not for nothing, but practically. It couldn’t have been done otherwise.”

Alongside Damon, an impressive roster of talent agreed to work for De Niro for a song: Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Timothy Hutton, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, John Turturro, and Keir Dullea among them (De Niro took a role for himself, and Joe Pesci showed up as well, as did such friends as Meryl Streep’s son Henry Gummer and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation boss John
C. Whitehead). The production took place mainly in New York and Connecticut, with side trips to England and the Dominican Republic. Robert Richardson, who’d shot
Casino
(as well as a slew of other films for Scorsese and, especially, Oliver Stone), was along as director of photography, and Tariq Anwar would be the editor. Most important to De Niro, though, was Milt Bearden, the CIA operative who’d helped him research his roles in
Ronin
and, yes, the
Fockers
movies. “Milt is the real thing,” De Niro always said, and the thirty-year CIA veteran helped impart notes of verisimilitude to the details of the story.

It had been more than a decade since De Niro had directed, though. The material wasn’t nearly as close to him as
A Bronx Tale
had been, and he admitted that he wasn’t always entirely steady in approaching the work. “
I didn’t have that much confidence,” he said. “As you get older, you have more confidence, obviously. In certain areas. In others … still don’t have much confidence. With this thing, every day I was worried.”

In part, he overcame his trepidations by focusing not on the epic scale of the film but on his strength as a collaborative actor. He would, according to Richardson, direct his cast from within the scene, letting the camera run as he instructed them on nuances of their performances, even breaking into the scene to do so. “There were a number of sequences where Bob would walk in and out of the frame,” Richardson recalled, “giving the actors notes on how the performances should shift on a particular line.… At some points we ran entire magazines [of film] simply on one line or as small as altering the gesture and position of an eye at a particular point.”

Such attention to detail was, of course, a hallmark of De Niro’s acting, but it also suited the material of
The Good Shepherd
, which was far more John Le Carré or Robert Littell than Ian Fleming or Robert Ludlum. “
In movies where people are shooting at each other all the time, it just seems too much,” De Niro said. “I like it when things happen for a reason. So I want to downplay the violence, depict it in a muted way. In those days, it was a gentleman’s game.” Similarly, he didn’t mind that the film was steeped in ambiguity, which of course was an essential dimension of the world of espionage. “I’m always so used to seeing movies that to me have an obvious payoff that doesn’t really follow
logically,” he said. “I felt this should be more restrained.… You want things to add up, and they must add up, but some things don’t add up in life. So that’s … that’s what it is.”

In October 2005 De Niro brought a short reel of scenes from
The Good Shepherd
to the Rome Film Festival, a new event that hoped to form ties with Tribeca. A crowd of some fifteen hundred people were on hand to watch the approximately fifteen minutes of footage and hear a few words from the director, who’d finally been granted his Italian passport that day from the mayor of Rome, a full year after the brouhaha about the negative impact of his portrayals of Italian American gangsters. In December, Universal Pictures released the film into theaters in the United States.

There’s a stately dignity to
The Good Shepherd
, an intelligence, a clarity of intent, craft, and form. It’s not as complex as a John Le Carré novel (or, indeed, some film adaptations of Le Carré’s oeuvre), but it has grand scope, and it impressively blends delicate character observation and low-boil tension. You admire it, but you never quite warm up to it, and a good deal of that might be because it’s impossible to understand what drew De Niro to make it, more than a dozen years after his notable and clearly personal directorial debut,
A Bronx Tale.

There are tiny bits of the film that seem as if they would particularly resonate with De Niro. It depicts a tender but strained father/son relationship: Matt Damon’s Edward Wilson has been abandoned by his own father and then raises a boy of his own, also named Edward, who’s emotionally troubled (he wets himself on Santa’s lap at a Christmas party, leading to a very sweet moment in which the father quietly and caringly cleans his son) and grows up to be skittish, earnest, and eager to follow his father’s path into espionage. There’s an interracial romance and a fascination with secrecy, betrayal, repressed emotion, and, naturally, the details of work. All of this seems suited to De Niro. But it’s hard to see the film as a vehicle of self-expression in the way De Niro’s previous directorial effort was.

Perhaps he nods toward that in his own string of brief appearances in the picture, playing Bill Sullivan, an obvious stand-in for William J. Donovan, the father of modern American espionage. He plays the role seated, because Sullivan suffers from gout, and when he’s last seen,
his legs have been amputated—perhaps a joking sign from De Niro that the making of the film took a particularly brutal toll on him. If that feels far-fetched, consider that Sullivan is the only person in
The Good Shepherd
who doesn’t seem stricken with a crippling case of self-seriousness. It’s a well-wrought movie, but overlong and too quiet and slow; ultimately, it lacks the spark of personal commitment and even obsession that made
A Bronx Tale
, let alone so many of De Niro’s acting appearances, memorable.

The reviews of
The Good Shepherd
were by and large respectful, even when critics felt the film was dull or muddled. “For the film’s first 50 minutes,” wrote
Newsweek
’s David Ansen in a typical response, “I thought De Niro might pull off the ‘Godfather’ of spy movies … but the unvarying solemn tone begins to wear.… Still, even if the movie’s vast reach exceeds its grasp, it’s a spellbinding history lesson.” In the
Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan praised the film’s “smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script” and “De Niro’s careful and methodical direction.” David Denby of the
New Yorker
was nigh rapturous: “One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage … long stretches of this [movie] are masterly; swift, terse, but never rushed.” But Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone
felt that the film “has no pulse,” Ella Taylor of the
LA Weekly
declared it “three slow, sincere and fitfully bamboozling hours,” and Michael Sragow of the
Baltimore Sun
said of De Niro and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, “Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.”

The mostly favorable reviews helped buoy the dense and broody film to almost $60 million in ticket sales (with another $40 million coming overseas), which would have been a nice result had the picture not cost nearly that much to make. It would go down critically and commercially as a noble but ultimately insufficient effort—not enough, perhaps, to encourage De Niro to seek a third directorial project, at least not right away.

D
URING THE YEARS
that lower Manhattan struggled to recover from the attacks of September 11, 2001, De Niro never lost sight of the work that needed to be done. He had shored up his own financial, cultural, and personal interests, of course, but he had worked doggedly for the good of the greater community, investing his time and money and lending his name and face to any number of efforts large and small to revitalize Tribeca and the surrounding areas. In 2004, he accepted an invitation to join the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, a group dedicated to raising half a billion dollars to build a suitable memorial at the site of the new World Trade Center, including, it was said, a performing arts center and museum. The board was packed with heavy hitters from a wide spectrum of fields, including David Rockefeller, Barbara Walters, Michael Eisner, Robert Wood Johnson, and executives of American Express, AIG, the Blackstone Group, Bear Stearns, and other financial entities. De Niro was included for his visibility and as a magnet for fund-raising, as well as in the hope that the Tribeca Film Institute, the not-for-profit wing of his film business, would become active in the proposed arts center. There were a few high-profile meetings—controversially held outside public scrutiny—before Governor George Pataki derailed the process in late 2005 by declaring that the inclusion of a cultural component for the World Trade Center site opened the door to too much controversy. Suggesting that the emphasis should be on the memorial itself, he shut the door on further work, and the board De Niro served on, however briefly, dissolved.

De Niro continued to make himself a face of good works, taking part in telethons intended to raise money for the victims of the 2004 South Asian tsunami and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. But he remained on the lookout for ways to invest—in all senses—in the culture of New York City. A new such opportunity presented itself in May 2006, when the cheeky weekly newspaper the
New York Observer
was going through one of its periodical financial crises, and its owner, Arthur L. Carter, was looking for a buyer. De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and her husband, venture capitalist Craig Hatkoff, considered putting on white hats and saving the paper. In fact, Tribeca Enterprises, the for-profit division of De Niro’s empire, was one of as many as a couple of dozen entities
approached by Carter to consider taking an 80 percent stake in the paper. A few weeks of due diligence ensued, generating a bit of buzz in the New York media terrarium. But in July, the Tribeca group backed away when a more substantial buyer, New York real estate heir Jared Kushner, stepped in and bought the
Observer
, leaving it free to join other New York papers in its seemingly endless exercise in cracking wise about De Niro, his films, his real estate holdings, and his private life, as had long been its practice.